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  China Cooks the Carbon Emissions Books Beijing redefines a key metric to make itself look greener. By A coal-powered Power Station in China   greg baker/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Unlike the West’s green radicals, China isn’t willing to sacrifice its economy to meet its climate pledges. But Beijing isn’t above cooking its carbon books to gull Western activists into thinking it is. Opinion: Potomac Watch At United Nations climate conferences in Copenhagen in 2009 and Paris in 2015, Beijing vowed sizeable reductions in the amount of carbon China emits per dollar of gross domestic product, or carbon intensity. Subsequent national planning documents reiterated this goal. Beijing’s statistics have since suggested it would fall far from delivering on this climate promise. And last September the head of China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment admitted  that “controlling carbon emission intensity is challenging.” Yet suddenly in March China reported that it had achie...
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  Newsletter The World China Exports Surveillance The country has spent decades perfecting a surveillance state at home. Now it’s promoting its ideology of state control, and the technology to enforce it, abroad. By  Katrin Bennhold I’m the host of The World. May 31, 2026 Updated  6:18 p.m. ET You’re reading The World newsletter.   Your daily guide to understanding what’s happening — and why it matters. Hosted by Katrin Bennhold, for readers around the world. When I first read about how China tracks its citizens with surveillance cameras and also ranks them according to a set of political and social criteria set by the Communist Party, it was impossible not to think of “1984” and Big Brother. Since then, China has become the world’s superpower of surveillance, much of it augmented by artificial intelligence. It’s Mao-era policing on steroids. And as my colleagues David Pierson and Berry Wang write, that model of policing is now being exported to authoritarian st...
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